Rethinking Success | Mia Birdsong

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How we doing? Something I've been thinking about and writing about a lot lately is how to define success. A shrink, a therapist I was seeing once, observed that I was, psychologically speaking, the apex of Western man. I believe that was the phrase he used. And I also believe he did not mean this as a compliment. He observed that because of my conditioning in this individualistic culture, I had come to view success in a limited way, really just in terms of money and power. And the skills that I had honed in this regard were what the psychologists called I skills, meaning they were all about myself. You know, how to work hard, how to hone my craft, how to stick up for myself. And I was lacking, according to the shrink, you skills. You know, skills that involved other people like communication, collaboration, compassion. And I wanna add here that this is not gooey or gauzy stuff, you skills. As the Wharton organizational psychologist and best selling author Adam Grant has often argued, these days in the workplace, character skills, in other words, you skills, are more important than cognitive skills, eye skills. Anyway, I bring all of this up because it was in this spirit that I got interested in the work of a writer named Mia Birdsong, who is my guest today. Mia has some provocative ideas about rethinking success, independence, individualism, and the American dream. For her, the real keys are relationships and community, I. E. Youth skills. I wanna say, just early and often here, I'm aware that words like relationships and community can come off as soft or cliched or anodyne or meaningless. That's the way, they came off for me for many, many years. But there is a growing body of research and thought that strongly suggests that these are actually the critical skills for health, for happiness, and, as I mentioned before, for success. So in this conversation, we talk about how to build community, what it looks like in Mia's life, community, mutuality as a concept versus reciprocity. How to work with resentment and rejection in community. The etymological connection between friendship and freedom. I find that fascinating. The transformative power of asking for help, something many of us struggle with. Why she thinks the idea of bootstrapping or going it alone is a kind of self hatred. It's a provocative idea. And much more. Just a little bit more about Mia Birdsong before we dive in. She's the founding executive director of a think tank called Next River, and the author of a book called How We Show Up. This interview was originally recorded and aired in the 2024, but we're reposting it as we approach a new year because we feel it could provoke a radical rethink for you, and this is the time of year to be doing that kind of work. Before we …